Audio: Bill Gates says so long to Microsoft — Bill Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer both fought back tears as they concluded a farewell event for the Microsoft co-founder on the company's Redmond campus this morning. Ballmer presented Gates with a bound scrapbook of photos and memories …

From the desktop to your TV — In the old days, we used to watch a simple device called a television. Nowadays, all the stuff worth watching and listening to tends to be stored on or accessed through a computer. To help remedy this, we are pleased to release the Google Media Server.

Google enters the PC to TV arena — Google today made its own contribution to solving the PC to TV problem with the release of Google Media Server. The Windows-only software works in conjunction with Google's desktop search application - Google Desktop - to locate various media (photos …

EXCELLENT HBR PIECE CHALLENGING THE LONG TAIL — Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School associate professor, has a really interesting article in the new Harvard Business Review that analyzes some Long Tail data and challenges some of the theory's predictions.

Virgin Mobile USA buys Helio for $39 million — Virgin Mobile USA will pay $39 million in stock to buy operator Helio, the company said Friday. — The deal ends more than a month of speculation that the two troubled mobile virtual-network operators would combine forces.

Apple plans a core for Beijing — APPLE Inc will open a retail store in Beijing this summer, its first shop on the Chinese mainland, to attract fans of iPod, Mac computers and perhaps iPhones. — Apple's new store will open in the Sanlitun, a fashionable bar area of the capital city …

Judge: Complaint Web Site Protected From Suit — A federal court has thrown out a defamation lawsuit against the site ConsumerAffairs.com, which posts people's complaints about retailers. — Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of Alexandria, Va., ruled that the site is protected from suit based …

.rose — Identity just got more complicated. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine — from .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, etc. to .anything. So there will be an explosion in what we nerdily called the internet namespace.

Apple makes example of iPod repairman in lawsuit — The owner of an iPod repair shop is being sued by Apple for misuse of the coveted iPod trademark — and of allegedly manipulating Apple to both send him replacement units for free as well as tricking the electronics giant into repairing out-of-warranty iPods.

Elevator Pitches, Now Ready For Your Uploads — Earlier this month we launched Elevator Pitches, a site for startup CEOs and founders to upload a 60-second video explaining what their companies do and how they make money. As I explained in the launch post, the idea is to create a repository …

Are iPhone app devs getting a raw deal? — We mentioned yesterday a rumor that Apple won't cut a check for iPhone application developers until the dev's share of the sales tops $250. A lot of commenters were upset about this, if it's true: TomWBrowning said “So if you make an app that costs $1 …